Topology based Infrastructure for Medical Emergency Coordination

Recent terrorist attacks and natural disasters have forced humanity to respond to crisis situations as effectively as possible. In these situations, especially the first hours, t he number of injured people exceeds the capability of a treatment facility and rescue workers cannot always rely on the existing communication infrastructure. This paper presents a coordination strategy for scheduling doctors to casualties in a crisis area, which uses an algorithm inspired by behaviour of ants in nature. Taking care of the distribution of victims in the field and their priority corresponding to the severity of the injuries, the proposed strategy optimizes the maximum number of lives saved. The necessary data is collected using electronic triage tags wi reless connected in a Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET). In order to facilitate the necessary functionalities the nodes are org anized in a special topology and the communication between them takes place via a distributed blackboard structure.